Memoirs of a beatnik (8 page)

Next day found me in a taxi, speeding up Fifth Avenue toward the nineties. Doormen approached cautiously. I spoke the password and they became gracious. Elevators opened and closed silently. I walked on plush carpets down long, spooky halls.

"Mr. Vandenberg vill be right dere," the maid said in her almost-Swedish, and left me in a room full of uncomfortable chairs, flowers, and even more uncomfortable Art. Then Mr. Vandenberg appeared and I suddenly understood my environment.

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We introduced ourselves and shook hands. He would not meet my eyes.

"I'll take very little of your time, Miss di Prima," he said dolefully. "If you will kindly step this way." A cultured Berlin accent.

We walked into a dimly lit bedroom, heavy draperies forming an thirties-movie arch over the high windows. I pulled them aside a trifle and looked out. Central Park stretched below us, full of sunshine, a reminder of another, greener planet.

Mr. Vandenberg suddenly remembered the duties of a host. "Would you like a drink?"

"No, I don't think so," I said. "Why don't you just tell me what it is I have to do."

He ran it down.

"Fine," I said. "Now, Mr. Vandenberg, I hesitate to bring up so delicate a subject, but Miss Vegas told me that remuneration for this-service—was to be-"

"One hundred dollars," he said, looking away sadly. "Will that do?"

"Yes," I said, "I think so. Can you pay me half of it in advance?"

Mr. Vandenberg reached for his wallet and drew out a hundred-dollar bill.

"I did not anticipate this request of yours, Miss di Prima, and I have nothing smaller. Do let me pay you in full now; it will be less embarrassing. We might find it difficult to do business in the presence of my wife's friends."

"Thank you," I said, "and while you're at it, you'd better call me Diane, don't you think? I mean, if you're supposed to know me that well, and all." It was hard to tell for sure in the dim light of the bedroom, but I could almost swear he was blushing.

"Thank you, Diane," he said, as gallantly as possible. "Please call me Wolfgang." He looked at his watch. "My wife and her friends should be here in exactly ten minutes, so if you would be so kind as to undress. . ."

"Completely?"

"If you do not seriously object, it would be better if you undressed completely." There was almost the suggestion of a bow, and he left the room.

Some Ways To Make A Living

I took off all my clothes, folded them, and placed them in an unobtrusive pile on the chair. Then I considered, took one stocking out of the pile, and dangled it conspicuously over the side of the chair, which I moved so that it was quite close to the bed-close enough so that it would, I figured, get in the photographs. I threw my brassiere on the floor. After all, I thought, we might as well have a dash, just a dash, of realism about all this.

Mr. Vandenberg came out of his dressing room in a bathrobe. He looked more pained than ever. His eye rested for a moment on the bra and stocking, but he said nothing about them. Then he opened the draperies and flipped a switch that controlled an indirect light right over the bed.

"You must excuse me," he said, "but they will need enough light to take pictures."

"Of course," I mumbled, nestling into the incredibly fine sheets, thinking how much I would like a nap.

"Do you mind," he asked, "if I drink? I feel the need of something to quiet my nerves."

"Not at all," I told him. "Go right ahead."

He rang for the Swedish maid and she appeared immediately with a tall glass of Scotch on the rocks. He looked down into it sadly.

"I can't tell you how much my wife and I appreciate this, Miss di—uh—Diane. The divorce laws in this state are so stringent—so very stringent."

He shook his head, ran his hands through his toupee, took a swallow of Scotch. Then he looked at his watch again, and sat down abruptly on the edge of the bed.

"Excuse me," he said, "but we must look more loverlike."

He took the covers down from my shoulders and uncovered one breast. He arranged my hair slightly on the pillow and, bending close over me, took one of my hands in both of his.

The door opened as if on cue. A handsome woman of about forty stood in the doorway. Three other people stood behind her. She stood as if shocked for a moment, then turned to the nearest of them.

"Oh," she said, in the measured, distinct tones of a bad actress. "Do you see that?"

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"What?" asked the person addressed, a thin, nervous young man in a peach-colored suit.

"That woman and Wolfgang, in my bed!"

Now this was scarcely accurate, but they all declared that they did see it. They all piled into the room, the last of the young men bearing a camera. He used it. Wolfgang, who had not moved all this time, now turned his profile to the camera. Friend took another picture. Wolfgang said, u Simone, my dear, I am sorry about this." Simone put her handkerchief to her face. Simone put away her handkerchief. Simone put her hand on Wolfgang's shoulder. She gazed at me soulfully.

"You are invited to stay for lunch," she said to me.

"Thank you," I said.

Everyone piled out of the room again, and I got up and started to get dressed, tucking the crisp hundred-dollar bill deep in my pocket, and wondering at the ways of the Law.

Some Ways To Make A Living

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City Spring

and ass of one or the other of us, indiscriminately loving whoever, whatever came within his or her range.

One night when Young Jack and I arrived back home from a pointless and joyous springtime jaunt to the Village, we found Lauren sitting in the hall by the door-I had never given him a key—hovering, half-crouching over a skinny pouting gamine complete with pixie haircut and big brown eyes. Her clothes proclaimed her middle-class Queens; her fright declared her new to the scene. I let them in, and so Runaway Julie was added to the menage. She slept in the bed with me and Jack and joined our preliminary games, sometimes allowing me to lead her almost to the edge of a quick little panting orgasm-but Runaway Julie didn't put out. This was considered a challenge by the ego-ridden Lauren, and he brought to bear all of his enormous (he thought) powers of seduction: introducing her to the various haunts in the Village, reading Freud aloud to her, filling her head with his own garbled philosophy—a kind of mixture of Aleister Crowley and Karl Marx—but he got nowhere at all. Julie confined herself to crushes, and confined her crushes to those Village faggots whose homosexuality was so total that she could not possibly feel the slightest threat in their presence. With them she was her playful, total self—a child among children.

I don't know how or when Henry with the Big Ears arrived. He was a mumbling, vague, gentle soul, and a mathematical genius—a drop-out from the Electronics Research Lab at Columbia University. His only loves were cocaine and Indian philosophy, and he indulged both constantly, unobtrusively occupying an empty corner, a small person of uncertain age in his nondescript rags. We all loved him—anyone would have loved him once they noticed that he was there. Henry slept wherever he fell out—bed or floor was all one to him—he easily wrapped himself around any of us, and easily fell asleep to the rocking rhythms of our lovemaking.

Henry was little, but well-hung, with a long, slender, well-formed cock and a supple body. When he took cocaine his staying power was enormous. He could—and occasionally did—literally fuck for hours, past orgasm and the possibility of orgasm, to the point of madness. I liked to keep him waiting, feeling his cock grow hard against my flank while I fucked Young Jack to sleep, angelically and joyously. Then I would turn on my side, slipping softly

City Spring

out from under Jack's pretty body with its smooth skin and the baby fat still on his thighs and face-turn on my side to Henry, who would be waiting for me with a grin on his face and his long dick in his hand.

I would throw one leg over him, pressing him close to me with my heel in the small of his back, and the whole of his long supple cock would slide into me easily—my cunt still slippery from my come and Jack's—and we would rock and sway together endlessly through a whole spectrum of pleasure while Young Jack and Julie slept oblivious on either side of us.

And so the days passed easily—it was a cool, beautiful Spring and the East Side was blooming: pads like my own were beginning to spring up here and there, one on Seventh Street, one on East Twelfth. Rienzi's, a new coffee shop specifically for the "young Bohemian crowd" had opened up on MacDougal Street: Mafia-run, like the Italian espresso joints, it did not cater to the usual Mafia clientele. We all sat there in the long afternoons, reading and making each other's acquaintance, nursing twenty-five cent cups of espresso for hours, and drawing pictures on paper napkins. Intoxicated by the stories of our youth, by Jean-Christophe and La Boheme, we thought to play a similar game. We almost carried it off.

There was the day Little John burst into our house—someone had given him our address and he was sick and needing a place to stay. We put him to bed with us and watched horrified as his fever rose from a hundred and three to a hundred and five and a half. He tossed and turned all night delirious, while we all drank cups of coffee and played chess, unable to sleep. The next day I paid a visit to a good friend, an older guy named Glenn, who was a longshoreman with a line into almost any drug one could need or desire. I got a handful of Seconal and administered them two at a time to the still-delirious John. He fell asleep. We all fell out, exhausted. And woke when his pills wore off and his ravings began again, and gave him two more pills. Next day red bumps on his neck and groin announced, we decided (having seen Forever Amber) that he had the bubonic plague. We continued to sleep beside him. We continued to give him pills for two more days and nights, as everyone's nerves wore thin. On the third morning,

City Spring

Little John woke seemingly lucid, and announced cryptically, "If I read Baudelaire this morning, I'm going to vomit." "So nu?" I thought in New York Yiddish exasperation, and went out. When I returned in the afternoon, there was John, sitting hale and hearty at the kitchen table. "I read Baudelaire," he grinned, "and I vomited."

Or there was the afternoon that I sat with O'Reilley at Rienzi's sipping jasmine tea and reading Journey to the East, feeling for all the world like a Lady Writer, when up to our table wandered Big Jack, a mulatto boy about six-foot-six with a glazed look in his eyes. He took his two hands out of his pockets, whereupon we saw that his wrists were cut, rather badly and jaggedly. "My pockets," he announced somewhat sadly, "are full of blood." "I'll bet they are," I said. We took him outside, made tourniquets of napkins from Rienzi's twisted about with a pencil, and then finally made bandages of more napkins and sent him on his way. But he didn't go far. We were eating in Minetta's Tavern on the corner an hour or two later when he wandered in lugubriously calling our names. Fed him our soup, took him home. Runaway Julie's remark: "I think I'm taking it very well for my first suicide." Gave him the sleeping pills left over from Little John's plague. He fell asleep between me and Henry. Julie slept on the floor because, as she said, "I don't want to wake up in the morning next to a corpse." Two days and three suicide attempts later, he seemed somewhat put together. We filled him full of left-over take-home sweet-and-sour Chinese food, sold the pawn tickets for our various possessions and bought him a ticket. Big Jack got on a bus and went back to his people in Worcester, Massachusetts.

The days got longer. About as long as they get. The changes began, summer changes in New York. Young Jack left for a summer stock job someplace in Indiana. Lauren found a chick his own age with a job, who wanted her own private magician, and he moved in with her. Henry with the Big Ears went off to build a corrugated tin shack on the Brooklyn mud flats together with two dropped-out physicists from MIT. And Runaway Julie went home to Forest Hills. O'Reilley and I lingered on in the pad, eating Pepperidge Farm bread and bleu cheese sandwiches in memory of Tomi, and writing in large grey notebooks.

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Then one evening I was walking crosstown to meet her in the Cafe Montmartre (favorite bar of the season, filled with calypso singers with gold earrings and conga drums, and messianic painters with curly, dirty beards who drank and fucked extravagantly). I had just been job-hunting, and so I trudged along in a blue skirt and blue high heels, half hoping to break them, or at least wear them down faster. A car pulled up alongside me and kept pace with my slow walk, a voice I half-knew called my name and, on my turning to answer, about three voices cried, "Do you want to go to the country?"

To one who lives in New York City, the country is the country. It is all one whether you mean the Adirondacks or the Arizona desert. The country is simply Not-The-City. It means you can see the sky, and probably something green, and maybe the stars at night. Everyone in New York City always wants to go to the country, is bored to death all the while they are there, drinks as much as possible, and expresses great regret on returning to the city. Of course I wanted to go to the country. I hopped right into the car, stockings and high heels and all, squeezed in between a skinny blonde girl in a Navajo skirt and a young boy with a banjo, and off we went.

We arrived after dark somewhere on a hill not far from the Hudson. A hill full of bonfires, soft sounds of guitars. Hard to say how many people, maybe about two hundred, scattered in small groups over the landscape.

I found my way to a fire, blanket less and chilly, and sat still to hear a warm, untrained voice singing "Spanish Is a Loving Tongue." There was a good, rich smell on the breeze which I recognized as pot-I'd been around it often enough, though I'd never had any. Then a fat, loosely rolled joint came into my hands and I took a drag on it.

Wind soft and balmy, slightly moist and smelling of green things. Young faces in the firelight, young bodies casting long shadows. Young Bill Thompson stopped singing for a minute and threw me a blanket. "You must be cold." Everyone huddled in two and threes in their jeans under Indian blankets, afghans, open sleeping bags.